1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an ink jet ink suitable also as a green ink and an ink cartridge and an ink jet recording method using the ink.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, pigments have been widely used as color materials of inks for use in ink jet recording methods because the fastness properties of images to be obtained are excellent. However, there is a tendency that the pigments are inferior to dyes in the color developability. In order to obtain images having rich color by inks containing pigments, so-called special color inks, such as red, green, and blue inks, have been used in addition to cyan, magenta, and yellow which are base colors of subtractive color mixture. Known as pigments for use in a green ink among the above is a halogenated metal phthalocyanine pigment (Japanese Patent Laid-Open Nos. 2001-354886 and 2007-246890).
However, it has been found that when the halogenated metal phthalocyanine pigment is used as color materials of inks for use in ink jet recording methods, sufficient ejection properties are not obtained in some cases. In recent years, images to be obtained by ink jet recording methods have been strongly demanded to have higher definition than ever before. However, since a reduction in the ejection properties considerably affects the image quality, an improvement thereof is required.